Faced with the myriad of problems including a long-term battle with the U.S., an ongoing epidemic, the slowing down of economic development, the threat of food shortage, an internal power struggle, the heating up of the South China Sea problem, and the internationalization of the Hong Kong problem, which triggers a crisis in the legitimacy of the regime, the CCP may make the very possible strategic decision to risk it all to create a military crisis along the Taiwan Strait, in an attempt to shift focus and pressure from internal to external, and to consolidate its political power.

The CCP believes while Taiwan has long been gaining surplus benefits from cross-strait economy and trade, it has concurrently been actively promoting “de-sinicization”, and capitalizing on the hostility between the U.S. and China by siding with the U.S. to resist the CCP. Therefore it has been harboring the thought of going a step further and unifies Taiwan with military force. With personal political calculations in mind, it believes that a small controllable conflict can achieve its political goal.

However, because many small conflicts are not always controllable, small conflicts develop into bigger conflicts, and into a full-blown unstoppable war.

Military drills have always been one of the tools the CCP uses to threaten Taiwan. Its military goal is using war to force unification, therefore its scale and strategy are mainly based on paralysis and acupuncture warfare with annihilation warfare on the auxiliary. In recent years, the Chinese Air Force has been routinely exercising over the southwestern waters of Taiwan, with its aircraft entering our Southwest Air Defense Identification Zone and flying through the Strait midline; our Air Force has on Sep. 5 confirmed, a reconnaissance aircraft from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was circling within our Southwest Air Defense Identification Zone during the night of Sep. 5 until the early morning of Sep. 6, at times it was approaching the Kaohsiung offshore. The CCP was attempting to round up Taiwan Strait into their area, push on further to manage and grasp the initiative of Taiwan Strait’s battlefield, therefore the pressure on Taiwan’s air defense would only be increasing.

The CCP army has many ways to put pressure on Taiwan, such as creating various fishing incidents and civil disputes as the fuse, exaggerate the situation to increase military confrontation, followed by strategies and methods such as sending fighter jets to fly over the Strait midline, around Taiwan, or even fire missiles over Taiwan’s sky, or getting fighter jets to fly near Taiwan’s airspace, etc.; or it would perform military exercises at the Southern waters of Penghu or eastern waters of Taiwan. All of these are different levels of military provocations, from gradually heightening the intense atmosphere to trespassing right onto your doorstep, until the national military has no choice but to react to the hostility, to which the CCP would respond by an even bigger military assault.

Moreover, using the Eastern Theater Command to launch a multi-services, multi-directional and systematic Joint-Operations military exercise and train at the northern and southern ends of Taiwan Strait, the CCP is proving the strength of the Joint-Operations. From the military perspective to verify the CCP army’s combat power, especially after the military reform, the CCP has indeed actively increased training on containment control, amphibious landing, island seizure, ship voyage and Air Force’s long voyage to strengthen the combat power of their long distanced joint operation; but the Marine’s air combat power is still inadequate, their shipborne aviation combat capability is also on a primary level, and therefore must rely on assistance from the Air Force to take advantage in the airspace in order to protect the safety of ships’ activities on the waters.

The PLA understands very well that mastering space is the key to war victory in the future; it is the root of communications, intelligence and navigation systems and would have an important effect on the PLA’s Joint-Operations. Therefore, it has in recent years been actively developing military aerospace technology, and its strategic intent is to use various satellites in orbit to support the military combat control, day and night reconnaissance, intelligence transmission and other military missions in the “First Island Chain” area in future. It is not difficult to understand that the CCP completed the BeiDou-3 system not just to use it for civil services like basic navigation, instant communication, international search and rescue service, etc. like it claimed, but it also aims to supply all-time, all-weather, global positioning for the CCP long-range weapons to fire with more precision.

The PLA continuously verifies “anti-access/area denied” from its equipment, training and drills, and its combat mode of surgical like strike patterns. It actively develops high-tech weapons, including space weapons, high energy microwaves, electromagnetic rail guns, directional enabling weapons, etc. It also continues to improve and strengthening the landing combat force of the amphibious brigade, the Zubr class air-cushioned landing craft with high-speed sea crossing abilities, which would pose a threat to the outlying islands of our country. Since it can launch assaults and seizures on our islands, it will significantly increase the risk and difficulty for our army to guard the outlying islands.

Facing the ever-advancing high-tech weapons and new, creative battling skills and strategies, the enemy looks more threatening than ever, even the involvement of Taiwan and Penghu’s defensive combat styles is completely different. But the mentality of our army is still stuck in the traditional setup, its army building and way of thinking lack innovation and is inflexible, its battling tempo can easily be sussed out by the PLA and would be forced to be in a passive position. As said in “the Art of War,” “those who know how to fight the war can avoid being defeated, but cannot be certain to defeat the enemy.” Therefore, we must first make ourselves undefeatable before we can plot our enemy’s defeat. When the enemy’s threat is becoming more serious, and it is already under a strategic structure of long-term cross-strait confrontation, our army must make drastic changes as soon as possible to break through current stereotypes and create Taiwan-Penghu defense combat’s best combination and formation.

(Chang Yen-ting, university professor, former lieutenant general and researcher of the Stimson Center)

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